ECOPOLIS
The Associational Civic Public
Ralph Miliband (1989) coined the phrase Divided Societies to describe the way that capitalist modernity divides individuals according to class. The point goes further when one examines the antagonism that modern society structures between the individual and the social, expressed in the division of paid and unpaid labour, the dualism of egoism and altruism, the separation between state and civil society, between politics and economics. This dualism is a source of diremption and not only generates crises but prevents their solution. Social democracy and Communism attempted (by different means) to shift the focus from the individual to social but without transforming the diremptive structure. The result was an imputed common interest through the state as an illusory general interest, something felt as an infringement on liberty by individuals in civil society. The approach conceived society as a giant corporation. An ecological polity and economy removes the dualism at the heart of society, thus putting individual and society, egoism and altruism, together.
This perspective locates politics in the associational space of the civic realm between the market and the state. The ‘green capitalists’ focus upon reshaping market forces so that prices reflect the full social and environmental costs. Against this, ‘left’ greens opt for conscious social regulation through a democratized state. This simply reproduces within the green movement the sterile capitalism versus socialism politics that has long since run its course in the parliamentary and electoral sphere. Both eco-capitalist and eco-socialist positions presupposes the classical dualism between state and civil society, public and private, which erode both individual freedom and common good. Capitalism is not a public domain, it is regime of private accumulation that operates by its own systemic imperatives rather than political will. The point is that both the state and the market must be transformed in one and the same process of expanding the civil sphere and investing it with forms of political and economic governance.
The associational space of the civic sphere is the locus of this transformation. The green perspective adheres to the ecological principles of symbiosis and integrated systems; it avoids dualisms, splits and separations by conceiving society as a web and a network. This sees the local and the global not as opposites nor even as two extremes but as joined together on a continuum and, further, the one being present in the other. This approach avoids the dangers of localism becoming a parochialism and avoids ‘small’ being narrow and powerless. The key principle is one of linking scale between levels of association — from neighborhood to planet – so that power is located and is exercised at the level at which it is most competent and effective. The challenge is to create and sustain a harmonious relationship between these nested hierarchies of regulation according to an ascending theme of power, the whole being powered from the bottom up as power rises to its appropriate level. This is a question not of size but of scale. The harmony between different levels is achieved by ensuring the integration and interdependence of the parts within the wholes; this is a principle of relative self-reliance between the levels.
To achieve this kind of regulation requires a substantial rearrangement of power and its location. The rise of capitalism was associated with the centralisation of political power in the modern state. Communities were divested of political significance. The green polity entails the political investment of civil society so that communities will have a voice in a number of areas, allowing them to exercise stewardship and impose green bans. The devolution of powers and the changing of laws is a form of reregulation from below, involving communities setting social and environmental standards through new forms of grassroots participation in governance.
In a political sense, it is in the community that the real concerns of individuals can be most effectively embedded in social and ecological development. The state here is the institutional framework within which community organisation and consciousness proceeds. The principles of the green polity integrate markets within greater levels of governance. Since this perspective affirms use value over exchange value, there is an accent upon social organisation, particularly community control and relative self-reliance.
This is part of the definition of wealth in qualitative terms through ecosystem productivity and production for service and social use rather than for private accumulation. This means moving beyond distribution to quality of life and sustainability in production. Growing levels of relative communal self-reliance implies greater potentials for a self-governing society on the basis of multiple interacting and complementary forms of mutual aid and support.
Society fits the contours of nature in becoming itself a self-regulating organism. Self-regulation is not a green version of the free market or invisible hand; the green economy does not operate without political intervention. Indeed, there is a much greater degree of political involvement in the sense of the conscious control of collective human powers. But this is a different kind of politics and a different kind of involvement. It is politics in the Aristotelian sense of politikon bion, as itself part of the community. This is not intervention from the outside to implement a programme from above but a conscious involvement on the inside to fulfil a social purpose. This is a politics forged by real social bonds. As in Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, ethical action is embedded in everyday endeavour, not exclusively in private personal life, but through the integration of individuals within social roles and identities that complement each other within the whole. Politics would be a matter of cooperation and human flourishing, not competition and self-aggrandizement.
Community-oriented self-regulation would resolve the dualism of egoism and altruism by making available to the individual a social identity which connects the personal good to the common good. This does not deny the existence of selfish drives within the individual; rather, it seeks to sublimate those drives by providing the outer-looking framework that encourages individuals to seek a richer realisation of their true self. The ethical life designs social forms and provides social identities which consciously nurture and support that positive side of the human personality, the side that transcends desires and wants to seeks harmony, growth, and meaning. This is not Utopia but Eutopia, the creation of the good place which corresponds to the human ontology and gives a home to realised human nature.
The distinctive feature of capitalist modernity is the way that economic activity has been severed from its social context and in abstraction proceeds according to its own ‘laws of motion’. This is not a case for reverting to the pre-capitalist social order in which the economy was one part of social life subject to state control. The state as an institution originated in part as the community of all communities, securing the common good, but soon developed an interest independent of its parts, coming to order, suppress, and direct human social activity. The state in this respect is an institution shaped for domination, which over time has had to accommodate itself to changing human potentials and activities as individuals have associated to reclaim the common purpose back to the social roots from which it originated. The state as an institution for domination abstracted from the social impulses of the individuals composing the state is soon drawn into rivalry with other such states, adding another dimension of organised violence, causing each state to equip and prepare to protect against the destructive impulses of others, the very same forces of domination they have cultivated in their own citizens.
As painful as it is to acknowledge it, when leaders of the gun lobby in the USA argue that civilisation is built by the gun, they are stating one part of the truth. A very partial truth, certainly, but a half truth is half true. Anthropologists will confirm that organised war is the product of civilisation. As soon as cities and settled patterns of production and agriculture developed, outsiders would organise to expropriate any economic surplus by force. States and cities had to organise their own defence and protection. The greater the level of civilisation, the greater the weapons, the arms budgets, the wars.
Civilisation brings organised war. All regimentation and straight lines, the machine comprising human parts, rigid movement with no spontaneity, no creativity, no poetry in the soul – in fact, no soul at all.
Evil on the march Munkacsi
And an entirely misguided and wrong-headed feminism seeks to involve women – humanity’s best and maybe last and only hope for an ecological civilisation - in the murderous madness. Emancipation is not to be achieved by a redistribution of power within the Megamachine, but by a complete restructuring of power so as to recover our essential humanity against the machine.
Monty Python had the sketch about the Ministry of Silly Walks. This belongs to the Ministry of Silly Marches. But there is a rationale behind it. This is the Megamachine telling its human parts how high it will jump and in what way. The machine lets the human parts know that they are mere cogs, entirely lacking in individuality.
We used to have celibate priests in frocks, eunuchs, men as women venerating the ancient Goddess and celebrating her life-giving powers. Now we have women in uniform marching like men in the cause of death. They’re marching in the wrong way and in the wrong direction
The nexus of state, domination, civilisation and war can no longer survive. The destructive cycle of escalating violence always threatened the long term survival of civilisation. The moral powers of humankind have never quite been able to keep pace with or catch up with technical powers. Ironically, human technical creativity and ingenuity have brought us to the long run when humanity's survival is directly threatened.
One of actor Pete Postlethwaite’s final films was called The Age of Stupid, looking back from the ecological wasteland of the future to bemoan every missed opportunity for taking practical action to avoid climate change. As big a danger as stupidity, however, is cynicism, the deliberate focus upon the negative and assertion of what can’t be done out of some misguided claim to realism and pragmatism. It is a very modest claim that more sustainable forms of social organization are possible given existing levels of institutional capacity, scientific knowledge and technical innovation. Such forms already exist and have always existed as conforming to essential human nature, always marginalised, excluded and threatened with suppressed by power as domination. The challenge of an ecological politics is to emancipate and universalise these social forms and bonds on a larger scale within the polity as a whole. And the locus of this undertaking is community. For many vapid and vacuous, for others an abstract entity repressive of individual liberty, community is the expression of the social nature of human beings, the common ties, bonds and ethos that is crucial to individuation.
It’s time to make peace with ourselves, with each other and with the world. Forget marching to the tempo of the machine in the cause of a living death, Picasso showed us how to dance to the rhythm of life.
Vive la Paix 1954 Picasso
Self-Regulation in the Eco-community
The argument in this section focuses on various aspects of self-regulation in an ecological society. (Much of what follows is based on Designing the Green Economy by Brian Milani 2000 Rowan and Littlefield).
In contrast to the ‘free market’ of the capital system, self-regulation in the ecological economy is not driven by the profit motive. Nor is it driven by technological change, or by any external forces or systemic imperatives divorced from society. The self-regulating society is powered by the social and ecological values implicit in human self-realisation. Since society is conceived as a living organism of interdependent parts, no one factor can be abstracted from and raised above the others, be it political, economic, technical, military or cultural. The one thing that matters is the whole organism as more than the sum of the parts.
The very concept of self-regulation is, of course, something of an ideal type, a Platonic ideal form that can never be completely replicated in the world of particulars, only approximated. Self-regulation therefore does not imply a society in which politics has been put on ice and tensions and disagreements do not occur. What has been eliminated is the conflict and antagonism which is based in institutional domination and alienation. Far from being the end of politics, this is actualisation a return of politics to its roots as politikon bion, the public context for the realisation and harnessing of human potentials as social powers — spiritual, political, economic, technological, and cultural.
Certain strains and perspectives associated with deep ecology give the impression that concerns with speciesism identify greens as misanthropic, preferring animals to human beings, etc. The Aristotelian formulation that man is a zoon politikon offers a way of avoiding a nature/culture, animal/human split by recognising that human beings are political animals. This allows greens to argue that such human potentials do exist and can be exercised in concert with others in society, the human self-realisation as natural and social. It is these human potentials that are being systematically suppressed by industrial capitalism and diverted to anti-social ends which contradict rather than correspond to the human ontology. The moral and political imperative is to find the appropriate social forms to manifest these potentials in public life. This does not involve the state implementing a detailed blueprint, but rather highlighting the principles and practices that enable people and communities to realise their own potentials.
The self-regulating society therefore rests on social forms appropriate to human development.
There is a need to identify the combination of forms and factors that can enhance self-regulation:
The scale of the economy: community and bioregional organization, harnessing technological potentials for decentralization via reutilization industry, distributed energy-generation, eco-infrastructure, local money, co-operative consumption, and so on.
Participatory democracy: green municipalism, participatory Green City plans, community indicators, and pattern-language development.
A green regulatory structure: including community design pattern-languages, performance standards, product stewardship systems, product and substance bans, and other rules that encourage bioregionalism, quality, and community.
Green market mechanisms: ecological tax systems, account-money and other community currencies, and a green financial infrastructure.
Knowledge as a regulatory force: via resource inventories, eco-accounting, product information and labelling, and community indicators.
(Brian Milani Designing the Green Economy 2000:187/8).
These tools of economic management are necessary but not sufficient conditions of achieving sustainability. Sustainable living requires a culture in which real citizenship and community are realities through social bond, shared goals, and a common spirit. The economic forms and tools detailed above are also means towards fostering a sense of solidarity, reciprocity and commonality. They are the economic forms of extended sociality.
Plots of Land at Montmartre 1887 Van Gogh
Appropriate Scale And Social Responsibility
Criticisms of science and technology should be directed against the big science, technological determinism, and technological imperatives which are all of a piece with the rationalisation of capitalist modernity. Technology and technological innovation contain potentials for a greater diffusion of power. The efficiencies issuing from a bioregional organization of reutilization industry and ecological agriculture; the interactive and decentralized character of hypermedia; distributed generation of clean energy; the participatory and distributed nature of eco-infrastructure — all contain possibilities for the democracy as a practice within community control. (Milani 2000:188).
In other words ecological economic systems make the exercise of social responsibility on the part of the people organised in their own communities much more possible. This is not a case of small against big but of appropriate scale in the conscious use of technology. The interesting thing is that the most resource-efficient and productive technologies tend to function most effectively on human scale. For some time it seemed that technology imposed larger scale and centralization. Now, such assertions appear to be politically loaded and self-serving.
The conscious application of decentralised technologies is only one part of achieving appropriate scale. Local currencies (non-account-money) and cooperative consumption (such as the sharing of tools and durables in neighborhood prosumption centres) are forms of creating community which foster local interdependence and achieve levels of participation that resist centralisation and exploitation. These diverse forms of production and consumption are integrated within a plural and active civil society, which becomes the associational space for the participatory citizen democracy implicit in the activities and demands of the new social movements. A thoroughgoing grassroots participation and networking establishes the ecological relationships crucial to self-regulation within the whole community. Together, the eco-infrastructure of sustainable forms, tools of convivial development, appropriate scale, social responsibility and accountability and active citizen democracy form the content of communal self-regulation.
This is to interpret democracy as an expression of individuation in community with others. In arguing that “Democracy is the truth”, “democracy is the generic constitution”, Marx was following Aristotle’s conception of the social nature of human beings requiring a public life to its socialised conclusion: “democracy is the essence of all political constitutions, socialized man as a particular political constitution”.
“Democracy is the solution to the riddle of every constitution. In it we find the constitution founded on its true ground: real human beings and the real people; not merely implicitly and in essence, but in existence and in reality. The constitution is thus posited as the people's own creation. The constitution is in appearance what it is in reality: the free creation of man” (Marx Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State 1975).
In an ecological perspective, this equation of democracy and human development, the realisation of democracy as human self-realisation, is reinforced by the connection between participation and appropriate scale and technology in the production of life. There is also a growing awareness, particularly with respect to ICT, that complexity generates democracy in the active sense. The external forms of hierarchical control are now dysfunctional. The various forms of "internal self-regulation" develop an appropriate management and coordination in contrast with the cumbersome forms of external management which typify capitalism. Capitalism is strong in delivering quantity, but its shell and its supports rest on a top down hierarchical control of a hollowed out centre. The emptiness of its wealth creation, the meaningless of its central dynamic and its hollowed out society is its greatest weakness. The decadence of consumer culture and the apathy of electoral politics in the modern world are consequences of the suppression of democratic potentials for internal self-regulation under the weight of business imperatives, state directives and wasteful practices. Internal self-regulation on a human scale necessarily means democracy in an active sense, the socialised humanity towards which individuals should be in the process of transitioning to in their praxis. This transformation is possible through an extended sociality in community. Democracy in an active sense is not the form – it is no more electronic polling than it is ordinary polling – but the everyday practice. And as a practice it is that is embedded on the various levels of community. Further, a level of economic self-reliance enables politics to be coextensive with everyday work life. Ecological forms of production permit democracy to be practised in everyday relationships through neighbourhood and community councils as well as through explicitly political organizations. Appropriate scale allows direct accountability and general participation to be combined with competence and effectiveness in the use of power. The new information and communications technologies enhance the interpersonal connections within communities whilst connecting these communities together through regional, continental, and global networks.
Participatory Planning And the Eco-Community
The defining principle of an ecological politics is a holism that ensures that the ecological imperative pervades every area of life as a principle of natural power produced and reproduced in everyday life. Ecological politics affirms the interpenetration and interaction of the parts within the whole and is directed toward overcoming autonomy of and boundaries between various components.
The development of the ecological community obviously has implications for urban design and city building, encompassing all areas of life valued by the people constituting the community. A green plan would be drawn up by specialists and experts in conjunctions with community members and form the basis for the development of community indicators according to ecological standards: community guidelines, approximate targets, performance standards, community finance. The plan would be based on detailed information concerning eco-accounting and resource evaluation. And it would draw on the principles affirmed by social movements and community groups. The idea of an eco-community plan is rests on an ongoing cooperation between activist/experts in various sectors (local employment, transportation, energy, food system, and housing) and invites contributions from local labour councils, women's associations, antipoverty groups, environmental coalitions, and progressive business representatives to discern an ecological development strategy that factors in community concerns.
Democratisation is a process that travels two ways at once. At the same time that an emphasis is placed upon the political investment of the social world through grassroots alternatives, so the formal institutions of the conventional political sphere must also be democratized. The formal sphere remains within the Green polity and continues to set the institutional framework for the overall rules of the game. It follows that democratisation is as relevant to the formal sphere as to the social sphere. “Democratizing the state" and democratising society from the bottom up are two parts of the same process.
Some visions look past the state. Murray Bookchin proposes a political structure of direct democracy based on active and informed citizens participating in town councils and local communities (Bookchin 1995, From Urbanisation to Cities, Cassel; see also Janet Biehl, 1998 The Politics of Social Ecology, Black Rose). The active democracy of a green municipalism does not imply that ‘all as individuals’ decide on all policy details at all levels, as Hegel’s repudiation of direct democracy would have it. Rather, democracy is a combination of direct and participatory forms with power residing at appropriate levels of competence. The principle of subsidiarity means that the base level of the "nested hierarchy" of regulation is the one that powers the other levels, thus making the "hierarchy" a "lowerarchy" (Brandt, 1995). Like power, representation exists at each level, with some levels higher than others. But this is a functional and organic representation in which higher levels are responsive and responsible to lower levels, not the top down abstract representation of the modern state. This is to see direct and representative forms as complementary rather than contradictory.
At the heart of the ecopolis is the idea of a green municipalism organised around the citizen assembly and encompassing neighbourhoods and parishes, according to different contexts and cultures. Citizens assemble to discuss and decide on affairs of common concern, with ongoing citizen interaction and input formulating policy. The citizen assembly forms the basic political unit, organised from the lowest levels of competence upwards. Citizens would elect representatives, who would be subject to recall, and who would be charged with negotiating with others to secure the interests of the people they represent. They would not be delegates carrying out mandated decisions since such a notion precludes discussion, negotiation and compromise at a higher level, stifling politics. The job of representatives would be to articulate the will of the community on the next higher level of assembly, to negotiate rather than assert, to find the basis for commonality at a higher level. They would also, in turn, elect the representatives who would proceed to the next higher level of assembly and who would proceed according to the same principles. In this manner, communities would be confederated with other communities; interdependence would be institutionalised as against the coercive hierarchy of the top down state. This amounts to the realisation of Aristotle’s definition of the state/polis as the community of communities, the legitimate claims of each and all recognised within the appropriate spheres. This political framework articulates regional, national, and even planetary interdependence based on relative independence. This is what Aristotle understood as autarkia, self-sufficiency.
The idea of green municipalism is the original conception of the political form of the Green movement as the "anti-party party." The idea keeps alive the vision of a ‘new’ politics, something which is essential if green parties are to avoid degenerating into conventional ‘catch all’ machines preoccupied with electoral appeal, policy and legislation. The time perspectives of electoral politics are necessarily short term, the message being directed from one election to next at various levels. To be politically organised and effective without becoming absorbed in the narrow affairs of conventional politics is a difficult task for a movement focused upon long term strategic thinking. Green politics succeeds or fails to the extent it achieves this long term strategic focus and structural change. Which is where the connection to movements and municipalism comes in. The challenge is to combine a short and long range perspective in green politics. Until citizen assemblies are strong and functioning and capable of constituting the municipal order, the movements could still participate in the formal political sphere, standing as candidates and being the voice of citizens and social actors in existing political institutions, thus advancing green politics through their moral and educational power.
True democracy is the de-professionalization of politics as the emphasis comes to be placed on citizen participation at various levels of government. The principle of subsidiarity is central to this perspective. Power should reside at the lowest level of competence and be pooled upwards by consent. Green municipalism stands in complete contrast to the conventional political sphere and the way that organised political parties come to replicate the hierarchical relationships of the central state and capital system. Such parties are fundamentally antidemocratic in the way they operation.
To conceive the Green Party as the ‘anti-party party’ gives members and supporters the onerous task of squaring the circle and making the means correspond to the ends. In this scenario, green parties are formed to give non-party social forces a political effectiveness. It requires that the law of political physics be bent out of shape, a political equivalent of Einstein, Heisenborg and Bohr. It requires that a political party uses both party and non-party means to give political voice to social movements and actors at the level of elections, policy and legislation in short term conventional politics whilst at the same time fostering ecological structures and infrastructures and community networks in order to create the broader municipal networks which form the basis of the green polity.
It takes a sentence containing 63 words to define the scale of the task in front of the ‘anti-party party’. It requires that the need for political engagement and political effectiveness be prosecuted without forgetting its point and purpose and without losing its organic connection with various forms of community self-governance. Local government and local utilities would be involved in formal politics at the local level, and it is possible that much of the administration of these programmes could be undertaken by community groups, activists in league with experts. In this manner, the party becomes the non-party by absorbing formal governance into the self-governing community. This is to see the party as self-dissolving the more green municipal political structures become viable. The vision of green municipal citizen assemblies taps into the vast potential that exists for democracy in the sense of active and informed citizens in civil society.
Communal Self-Regulation and the Green plan
Associative democracy and participatory planning provide the institutional framework for new forms of communal self-regulation, a social order based on rules which reflect principles defined by social actors within the community. This order directs purposes, provide incentives, coordinates activities and supports innovation and experimentation. The Green plan lays out the objectives and the principles according to which the rules are continually evaluated and articulated.
As with appropriate scale, convivial tools and civic participation, regulatory structures require substantial changes in law and administration so that vision and policy can be implemented. And this requires a political movement which is strong and effective enough, and has substantial roots in the community.
All social orders are rule based, with a range of social conventions from norms and codes to laws defining the way that things should work. The rules of the eco-polity are distinctive in a number of ways. They are an explicit statement of an ecological vision, making clear the goals and purposes of social action; they are simplified in being built into everyday social practices so that the vision is an ongoing, everyday eco-praxis. The ecological vision is strengthened by a regulatory system based on performance standards concerning excellence, incentives and disincentives for resource use, mandated activity. This regulatory system is designed to instigate efficiency in resource use, place limits of chemicals and materials, impose product bans, improve the health of human beings and their habitats, reduce damaging environmental impact and pollution, and create high-skilled work in the community.
Product and material bans have a role not only in cleaning up the environment and boosting health but in fostering bioregional economies. Bans enable substitution as a multidimensional process. Material and substance phase-outs are part of an overall strategy leading to the creation of the ecological economy, with the substitution of one chemical for another generating an extra industrial development, in the way that plastics, for instance, made possible a new transport-based food industry. Bans forcing substitution create economic incentives to create local and regionally based systems, say of fresh healthy foods produced by local farms, generating local employment, giving a community an identity. Bans could also give a stimulus to greenhouse technology and production with "solar cooling" and refrigeration. The possibilities are endless. Designed with the local and regional economy in mind, green taxes could add a further stimulus to turning waste streams into resource streams, based on technical knowledge concerning possibilities for economic conversion and detailed information of the bioregion.
Architectural and community design are crucial in fostering and articulating social relatedness. The contemporary world is populated by anti-cities and anti-communities. The external ugliness of physical place expresses the ugliness of the inner relations, the anarchy, isolation and diremption of private-property relations. The regulatory framework establishes the rules which foster mixed-use development, values place and access over mobility and supports local building so as to create a sense of community identity and wholeness. Eco-design is therefore an integral part of a community self-regulation which embodies and articulates a community's vision and consciousness.
Solidary Eco-Exchange
Despite the scepticism of many green social actors, the market is simply one institution among others. The market-oriented approaches of the eco-capitalists are problematic not because of ‘the market’ as such but because of the environing relations of the capital system which shape economic behaviour as expressed in the market. The market is an institution facilitating connection and exchange between countless millions of individuals, coordinating any number of individual actions and decisions. It follows that the market could be a valuable institution that forms a part of the ecological economy, enabling a decentralised form of coordination between individuals, groups and communities. The task is to rearrange the parameters within which market mechanisms operate so as to encourage ecological activity. This is not the same thing as incorporating social and environmental costs into market prices, an approach which presumes the continuation of an economy driven by the profit motive. The concept of "making the polluter pay" is supposed to be a disincentive to pollution but it could also mean that, if the polluter does pay, he or she is entitled to carry on polluting. The concept rests public resources on the very behaviour to be discouraged.
The market needs to be detached from the imperatives of capital accumulation so that markets cease to be impersonal mechanisms for the accumulation of exchange value and instead become sites for the exchange of use value. There are various ways that this decoupling can be achieved.
The decentralized forms of production characteristic of the ecological economy functions on the basis of local currency.
The ecological economy requires municipal ownership of the primary means of production to ensure that a genuinely universal interest prevails. This is the case for common ownership. Trade unions and worker co-operatives could just as easily replace the rule of self-interest under capitalism with the rule of sectional interest, thus reinstating an economy driven by accumulation.
The problem is that common ownership of productive means generates more or less the same problems as nationalization. It's a collectivization that is the obverse of individualism, the other side of the same capitalist coin. It lacks human scale and flexibility. Society does not need to go to the extremes of collectivisation in order to defeat egoism, merely create the institutional framework and regulatory infrastructure so that the economy does not continually reward and therefore encourage egoism. This enables individuals to choose economic actions and engage in social practices that foster the common good. The precise role played by communal or municipal ownership is determined by appropriate scale and function rather than as a political assertion of collectivisation over individualisation, an opposition which presumes the very dualism of individual and society that is to be eliminated.
Replacing exchange value with use value and removing the profit motive as the central driver, market mechanisms are freed to play a role within the ecological economy alongside such measures as account-money, land taxes, community plan, nonmaterial and nonmonetary incentives. But the market will remain in place for practical reasons too. It will take time to develop account-money systems. Further, there is an immediate need to ensure that prices reflect real social and environmental costs. The principal aim of eco-accounting is not simply to make prices reflect environmental costs exactly but most of all to force the market to express real value. In other words, the concern is to ensure that business is continuously under pressure to engage in less wasteful and more ecological production. The key point to establish is that the market is an instrument in the design of the ecological economy, not the design itself.
Environmental Taxes
Environmental taxes are key instruments in "making prices tell the ecological truth" (von Weiszacker 1994: 117-28). (Von Weizsacker, Ernst Ulrich. 1994. Earth Politics. London: Zed.; Von Weizsacker, Ernst U., and Jochen Jesinghaus. 1992. Ecological Tax Reform: A Policy Proposal for Sustainable Development. London: Zed.)
These taxes have a number of purposes: to discourage polluting behaviour on the part of firms, to change patterns of consumer behaviour, to deter destructive practices, to raise revenue, to encourage public transport and discourage private transport, to incentivise eco-friendly living and so on. Environmental taxes are essential tools in the creation of an ecological service economy, changing practices and behaviours in a way that market mechanisms cannot do in themselves. Environmental taxation can achieve in the short run what regulatory changes attempt in the long run, reversing the relationship between materials and labour. Environmental taxes create a level playing field so that eco-materials can compete effectively with non-ecological products. This is all part of creating the ecological economy that discourages waste and pollution and encourages eco-friendly behaviour, shifting the economy from a capital-intensive profile to a people-intensive profile.
The revenue from environmental taxes can be used to finance citizen income schemes, giving individuals a guaranteed annual income, something which encourages community-wide eco-production through valuing socially useful work. Like local account-money systems, basic income programmes would undermine formal/informal economic divisions, breaking the disparity between paid and unpaid labour. As one simple programme, the basic income scheme is a substantial improvement over the various, confusing and bureaucratically administered support programmes of existing state welfare systems. Individuals would be free to earn more on top of the basic income. The citizen income programme could function as an integral part of the community-based economy, with income combined with environmental training and practice in such areas as urban gardens, farms and food production, energy retrofit, solar and wind energy systems, preventive health care, and other activities and skills beneficial to the community. In the context of community self-regulating systems, transforming the capitalist market mechanism, citizen income programmes function as a transitional support for community self-organisation as it develops.
Environmental taxes are part of a green regulatory framework which is designed to expand spaces in the economy for communal and ecological purposes. Environmental taxes can be utilised as positive measures that involve ecologically effective state intervention in the economy, the end of which is to enhance the intrinsically self-regulating character of the economy. Taxing polluting and wasteful behaviour and rewarding good behaviour whilst creating a level playing field for ecological and non-ecological products and practices is to establish a positive sum context that benefits all but the serial offenders.
Eco-Knowledge And Community Regulation
Knowledge is power. For all of the overblown claims made for the ICT revolution, half truths are still half true. Information might not actually be power but, if citizen association and ecological regulation can turn it into practical knowledge, information can certainly provide power. Information as practical knowledge can help the community to realize its potentials for self-sufficiency and self-determination. Information can be used in many ways to facilitate community development. Community indicators are an important expression of community values and embody a wide range of information about the community; the region and the environment; material resources; cultural resources; the habits and customs of the area; environing relations from neighbouring communities to the rest of the world.
The information society and the network society do not just refer to cyberspace but to places and people in community, including the environment and productive activity. In turning cities and communities into growth machines, the economy of mass production and consumption de-skilled citizens, users and consumers as much as it de-skilled factory workers. It conceived society as one big factory. A deliberately engineered public ignorance puts information and hence power in the hands of the state and business which properly belongs in a self-regulatory community.
The ecological economy must focus on knowledge-building as part of community capacity building, in areas of agriculture, manufacturing, the built environment, urban regeneration, communications, health, or social services. Green consumption can reward eco-production, with communities supporting local ecological producers and practices and so exercise substantial control over their development. But this support requires information enabling product evaluation and labelling according to locally developed criteria.
Ecological planning and decision making of this character requires an accessible information utility that contains information about the locality and region, a regional resource inventory that provides detailed information about physical resources, demographic, economic, and social statistics. By such means, information is plays a role in ecological decision making, strategic economic thinking, establishing priorities and evaluating alternatives in the transition from the high carbon to low carbon economy, from external regulation to internal self-regulation.
In much the same way as they are establishing links to local business, universities can serve to boost the knowledge of local communities. Universities are powerful resources in developing the appropriate databases and geographical information (mapping) systems which facilitate the development of both community indicators and Green planning for the long run. Schools, colleges, and universities can also function as centres for training and education with a view to fostering and sustaining the eco-development of the community. This focus helps create a degree of community control and independence apart from the abstract public of the state and the private imperatives of business.
With respect to strategic focus, communities need to make effective use of information and communications technology, extending community information, education and training, dialogue and visioning and as a result enabling the new technologies to realise their potentials for human emancipation. At present, these technologies are used for political misinformation and entertainment as escapism. Mass manipulation and stupefaction turns emancipatory potentialities into repressive realities. Most of all it is a massive waste of human potential. It follows that the environmental movement should engage in struggle concerning the design and use of ICT to enhance human and community power.
The Eco-Community and Planetary Transformation
The focus of this paper has been on ecological praxis and transformation in the developed world. The economies of the North are the main source of the global problems of ecology and poverty, are the principal polluters on the planet and are the principal obstacles to their resolution.
There is, however, an interdependence of the local and the global. Feasible alternatives emerging on the local and regional levels are apparent the world over. They are international alternatives which contain the potentials for extended sociality on a global basis for the long-term. The transnational corporations are globalising economic relations and creating the technical basis for a globally integrated mode of production. In a sense, this creates the economic and technical basis for global integration, cooperation and could even be described as a global level of community. Community at global level will, however, be realised only when global initiatives are organically connected to community power at the local and regional levels.
In this respect, municipalism has an international dimension, which is expressed in "confederalism" as the philosophy and practice of interdependence through a structure of network organization. Municipal confederations proceed from groups and individuals in a specific area to comprise citizen assemblies at regional level and upwards. The smaller communities are bound by their responsibility to the larger communities, up to the global community. International communication and support represent the pinnacle of extended sociality and require local and regional and national structures to ensure that solidarity is not thin through too great an abstraction in relationships.
As Robert Waller argues in Be Human or Die (1973), international solidarity is a goal with a long religious and political pedigree, from the Roman Empire and then Catholic claims of the universal church to the various socialist internationals from mid-nineteenth century and after. Past attempts at universalism have failed either on account of being attempts to coerce community into existence – this applies to all empires – or in being based on ties of solidarity that become thin and weak in extension. Networks and support structures need to be thicker so that extended sociality becomes a reality rather than a false and ultimately hollow claim to universalism. International solidarity is alive and well in the pressure to establish human rights, democracy, and fair trade practices.
The reduction of production and consumption along with a massive redistribution of wealth throughout the world is important, but the whole notion of ‘sustainable development’ must be based on changing conceptions of "wealth" if it is to have any meaning at all. (I prefer the term ‘sustainable living’). Real development, like real wealth, is more than the transfer of money or resources in a quantitative sense. This transfer is part of the solution, but the crucial factor is the restructuring of power. This begins by devolving power to the grassroots level, at home and abroad. Subsidiarity is a key principle, with power residing at the most appropriate level of competence, and organisation proceeding from the base upwards. This is to define a conception of global economic and ecological cooperation.
Green politics should have a position concerning the relationship of trade and investment to the environment. Two important concerns here involve increasing restrictions on the wasteful long-distance flow of material goods and resources and decreasing restrictions of the flow of information (Herman Daly 1996). (Daly, Herman E. 1996. Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Boston: Beacon; Daly, Herman E., and John B. Cobb. 1989. For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. Boston: Beacon.)
Within capitalist relations, globalization reverses these priorities, decreasing restrictions on the long-distance flow of goods through the promotion of ‘free’ trade, and increasing restrictions on the flow of information through enforcing intellectual property rights. Corporate globalization is forcing governments to agree to trade agreements which tie economic policy to purely quantitative economics and money-making as an end in itself.
From this perspective, measures such as capital controls and global (Tobin) taxes on speculative financial transactions are limited without an overall restructuring of power.
In fine, the key general principles of the ecological economy are:
An ecological trade policy should restrain and even inhibit external trade and direct investment whilst fostering the flow of information so as to help communities and regions generate and employ their own capital while cultivating productive activity through their own natural and social resources. This is generate capital in a social, cultural and ecological sense apart from exchange relations.
Any external trade proceeds without subsidies to brown industry and cheap energy. Global trade will no longer be possible on the basis of dirty energy and minimal transport costs.
The incentives and disincentives of global trade should be based on eco-indicators, full-cost accounting, and social use.
Ecological development should be prioritised.
(Milani 2000: 202/3)
Economic actors and social partners
The key agents of ‘organised capitalism’ were business, trade unions and the state. Strategic change has either come through or come through the pressure of one or more of these actors. Much radical politics suffers from nostalgia in suggesting an idealised view of how these agents should act, something which reappears in the green movement. Ecocapitalists champion enlightened business, ecosocialists envisage common ownership through the democratised state. In fact it is clear that business, trade union and the central state have no vision beyond the capitalism they know. The impetus for restructuring power and social relations will come from community groups or social movements. That said, business, trade unions and the state are not one of a piece and are not monolithic entities in themselves. There are enlightened actors in business, trade unions and the state who are receptive to the science and the politics of ecology and these are influential people in various areas that ecologists can work with. This is one way of easing the transition from the old to the new.
The largest scope for environmental economics is probably in the area of small business. It is here that myriad social forces meet - traditional small business, not-for-profit enterprises, for-profit co-operatives, ecopreneurs rather than entrepreneurs. Green architecture and construction, community-shared agriculture, auto share networks, also belong in this arena, where social and community movements develop their productive activity and is therefore embedded in the associational space of civil society. Whilst economic activity in this arena does not require large capital outlays for start-up, it suffers from a relative lack of resources and power vis large corporate enterprise. However, when eco-development becomes prioritised within communities, this arena has the potential to generate greater resources from within. Green community economic development as eco-preneurialism is a major force for raising community consciousness and vision. (Milani 2000: 204/5).
The multinational and transnational corporations have the greatest resources but also benefit most from corporate capitalism. These corporations are locked into the Casino Economy that has emerged on the manufacturing base. These transnational corporations are the main agents of globalisation and are pushing for the liberalisation of trade. In this scenario, the deregulation of controls at the state level forced by the TNC’s will have to be checked by a reregulation at the global level under the pressure of the environmental movement - new forms of liability, bioregional scale, community accountability, and worker participation. Leaving aside the structural constraints of the corporate milieu, there are people within the corporations who are doing serious work in the fields of industrial ecology and appropriate technology. The influence of these people will increase the more the environmental movement can mobilise pressure on the corporations to change.
By cultivating alliances with the more ecologically enlightenment end of business, the environmental movement could succeed in embedding productive activity into the community. Once major changes are given shape as policy or are incorporated into law, the potential for expanding corporate allegiances should expand. Business, subject to private economic imperatives, will not change its behaviour for ethical reasons alone. A regulatory framework changing incentives and disincentives and communities providing opportunities for profit through environmental activities is therefore crucial.
‘The state in capitalist society’ is a title of a book in which Ralph Miliband showed the power of the state is secondary and derives from the resources generated in the private economy. It follows that the state lacks political independence and must facilitate the process of private capital accumulation as a condition of its own power (Miliband; Dahl and Lindblom). The very capacity of governments to act in ways that the electorate demands – what is called parliamentary democracy – is constrained by the systemic requirements of private accumulation. Policy options are objectively limited in that the system of private investment, private property rests on the dynamic of capital accumulation which must be facilitated if economic growth, employment and prosperity is to be achieved. Clinton’s ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ revealed more than was intended. The fact that people’s lives depend on ‘the economy’ is obvious. Less obvious is the institutional and systemic aspect of this economic determinism which keeps people in a state of dependency. ‘The economy’ is not some natural, objective datum but is a social product subject to political controversy, intervention and change. When people understand ‘the economy’ to be a euphemism for capitalism, then they may be more willing to challenge its determinism.
The point is that, within capitalist relations, there are strict limitations on politics, morality and on the popular will. If the process of private accumulation is threatened in some way, then economic instability and even crisis follows and the legitimacy and popularity of the government is undermined. In other words, government power is secondary and derivative and is held on condition of acting to ensure the profitability and prosperity of the private sector. Critical pluralists like Lindblom came to understand the point very well:
Because public functions in the market system rest in the hands of businessmen, it follows that jobs, prices, production, growth, the standard of living, and the economic security of everyone all rest in their hands. Consequently government officials cannot be indifferent to how well business performs its functions. Depression, inflation, or other economic disasters can bring down a government. A major function of government, therefore, is to see to it that businessmen perform their tasks. (Lindblom, 1977, pp. 122-3) (Lindblom, C. E. 1977: Politics and Markets. New York: Basic Books.)
The central dynamic of capital accumulation means that government policy must pursue a political agenda that is intrinsically biased in favour of the system of private enterprise and corporate power. This puts severe limitations on any kind of politics motivated by anything outside of the remit of exchange value.
The state has a role in facilitating and resourcing community-initiated activities, but on community terms. But to expect substantial social transformation to come through the agency of the state amounts to a serious overestimation of the state power and independence. The capital system is not a public domain but a private regime concerned with accumulation above all. Transformation has to come from within the social metabolic order of control.
Local government has greatest potential given its close proximity to citizens in the community. Local governments can respond and be transformed quickly in areas where social and community movements can establish viable alternatives.
Trade unions are unlikely to be change-makers in any ecological praxis and transformation. The promised proletarian transformation of politics has long since stalled. The limited materialistic aims of workers as defined by trade unionism have been satisfied by capitalism. The organised working class have not, as Marx anticipated, pushed on from this basic platform to contest and attain control of social production. Marx once wrote of the bourgeois being happy in their alienation; the same applies to workers within the gilded cage of capitalism. That said, organised labour does have a role in the process of transition. Rejecting integration in the economy of unlimited material growth, organised labour must carve out its own position with respect to the redefinition of wealth, thus taking an interest in power and authority by rekindling an interest in worker-control and self-management.
Union initiatives in the conversion of production to ecological activity, a concern with useful work and a limitation of the working day extends ecoproduction and generates increasing fulfilling work opportunities for others. The hope is that workers will, one day, go beyond being grateful for being employed and come to take an interest in the work they do and, in securing an identity with the work, determine how to make it fully ecological. Manufacturing workers, for instance, have an interest in introducing industrial ecology to companies and putting a humanising slant on it that emphasizes the creativity of labour.
In being well informed with respect to applications of eco-technology, labour will be well placed in a world of continuous technological change. At the same time. Trade unions work hand in hand with the community as a market for socially useful production, giving them more influence on investment decisions. Research into ecological technology and conversion strategies, trade unions need to be working with universities to form a green think tank and working with communities to implement development strategies. A labour-oriented green community economic development programme requires a long-term vision and strategy that attracts allies in the community and in the business community. It also creates the foundation for increasing worker’ control over productive activity and for raising demands for worker ownership.
The transition from exchange to social use as a Prefigurative Strategy
The intention of this paper has been to highlight processes of contemporary change that point beyond economics as it is currently conceived and practised, towards a new qualitative conception of wealth. Fundamental transformations in the productive forces are altering the conception of wealth, away from material things that can be quantified, commodified and subject to exchange value to the quality of life and being, useful people doing useful work and producing useful things. John Ruskin declared that the economy doesn’t just produce material goods, it produces men. This is to develop an anthropological sense of economics and production. Paradoxically, millions of people are suffering material depravation and ecological destruction precisely because the capital system blocks the transition from material production to production for human growth and flourishing. This transition can be understood in terms of the switch from production for exchange value to production for use value, from a concern with private accumulation to a concern with social use. A concern with human growth is part of that broader social conception, setting economics in a moral and social matrix. (This is a view which, in Immanence, Transcendence and Essence, I connect to the essentialist tradition in philosophy, deriving from Aristotle, and which can be traced through the work of St Thomas Aquinas, Hegel and Marx. Here, I link the common ecological ground we share with a politics and ethics of the common good). It also concerns human growth as the realisation of nature within in relation to nature without. Human flourishing depends upon exchanging the limited mechanical materialism of capitalism, the world of ‘dead matter’, for the genuine materialism of nature as a living organism.
The connection between the new qualitative conception of wealth and human growth makes it clear that the ends to be served are not material wants but the anthropological needs of the whole human being. This goal requires a new understanding of social transformation as an ongoing process of self-emancipation and self-development in time that proceeds from below, not a one-off event that is imposed from above. Ecological praxis is an incremental organic process akin to ecological plant succession (Rodale, Robert. 1985. "Pioneer Enterprises in Regeneration Zones," Whole Earth Review, no. 47 (July): 34-38; originally printed as a pamphlet by Rodale Regeneration Project, Emmaus, Pa.). Prefiguration refers to the process by which the future social order is gradually built within the shell of the old. The task is to do this without co-optation within the status quo. The transformation of quantity into quality holds that it is possible to further gradual organic change that is ultimately radical and qualitative. The key to this transition is the growth of grassroots alternatives guided by large social visions as the content.
Revolution is an exciting word but an incredibly long, painstaking practice. To many erstwhile radicals, such ongoing practical activism is onerous and dull. Fortunately, most people have a good belly to earth understanding of meaning, truth and reality and these are the change agents engaged in developing vision through practical alternatives. This paper has offered a perspective on this with regard to green politics in general and green parties in particular.
The direct and practical character of ecological economic alternatives explains why their potential appeal is so great. The green wager is a "win-win" positive sum proposition. Properly designed, green initiatives protect the ecosystem in such a way as to reduce costs and increase benefits, reducing the quantity of things to give a higher quality of life with more useful, interesting and fulfilling work. Replacing the gross materialism of consumerism with a genuine materialism of human potentialities and powers, the satisfaction of wants is sacrificed in order to achieve the satisfaction of needs of a much higher order, from recognition to self-actualisation. For the first time in history, individuals can truly "Get a Life" (Roberts, Wayne, and Susan Brandum. 1995. Get a Life! How to Make a Good Buck, Dance Around the Dinosaurs, and Save the World While You're at It. Toronto: Get a Life Publishers.), realising themselves by serving society and the planet as a higher, more fulfilling quality of life replaces the treadmill of consumption.
With this "ecotopia" we move from utopia – no-place – to eutopia – as good place. This concern with real needs and capacities and qualitative factors is the most powerful resource of the ecotopian vision precisely because it is rooted in essential human nature. (I develop this idea of the realisation of the human ontology in place in Immanence, Transcendence and Essence). This is the vision that sustains belief in an alternative beyond the many and often necessary compromises with existing institutions and practices – world trade rules, the democratisation of the state, wage pacts and social contracts, and international environmental agreements. The compromises reach more people but only on more abstracted, remote levels within the system. The ecotopian vision addresses people at a much deeper psychic and anthropological level. The compromises reach more people with respect to issues and institutions of immediate relevance, but there always remains a need to go deeper and provide practices of substance that resonate with people's real material needs and hopes.
There is no doubt that central governments can use community economic development to avoid responsibility and shift expense elsewhere. And there is a danger of that it could also be used as a way to keep those on the margins of economic activity occupied in low-paid self-employment while the corporations continue to monopolise the big money in world markets. For genuine, substantial and enduring community economic development, community agents must become the central agents of productive activity, forming the centre ground of the new eco-community. The task of a green politics is to demonstrate how this can be achieved. The increasing polarization of society between rich and poor and the way that the financialization, liberalisation and privatisation of economic life is fracturing society makes it essential to address the roots of current problems and develop alternative plans that serve social and environmental needs whilst actualising immanent potentials for the flourishing society. This involves a strategic perspective based on existing and emerging lines of development.
Utopianism become practical as an ecotopianism. Green politics is oriented towards starting and sustaining projects and cooperative enterprises in every sector of the economy. Everything worth doing can be done in an ecological way. ‘Done well’ is shaped by an understanding of the meaning of the word ‘well’, the eu in eudaimonia or good spirit or happiness and in eutopia as good place.
Social movement activities grow more positive when the accent is placed on the good — seeking an end to poverty, homelessness, exploitation and domination, sexism and racism. These and other injustices and inequalities are addressed by the development of grassroots alternatives as well as campaigns. This is to go further than defending past gains such as universal health, education and welfare by demanding more comprehensive, more proactive community-based services. Campaigns against corporate trade agreements and ecological half-measures are bolstered by alternatives already underway in many parts of the world. Radical solutions mean going to the root, not to extremes; solutions are centred and organic in a way that the institutions driving crises are not. Integrated systems and interactive cooperation can deflect attacks and force them to the outside whilst expanding the middle, thus turning the negative into positive. Arguments over left and right are thus beside the point. Intellectual clarity at the expense of sharp political division and practical movement is of no use. The great benefit of ecological praxis, based in alternatives and demonstrating practical effect, is that, whatever the obstacles, it provides tremendous personal fulfilment and sustains hope in the future. There is great personal satisfaction in working with others to have a positive impact on the environment, making community gardens, in building ecological structures, in providing regenerative human services, a natural, ongoing, organic process which contrasts with the physically and psychologically exhausting politics of protest, with its endless opposition, dualism and conflict. Instead if being focused on the negative, organising and acting against things, it is more healthy to be focused on organising and acting for something. Instead of constantly opposing a recalcitrant present, it is more much positive to be working towards the possible future.
Unfortunately, with global warming promising ecological catastrophe through climate change, hope comes with a timetable and a deadline. There is no time for utopia, only feasible alternatives that can be started in the present world with the support and contribution of real people. Opposition to finance, banks, the TNC’s etc is easy enough and is generated by the everyday operation of the system itself. Understanding the systemic roots of economic and ecological crises is more difficult and creating, sustaining and mobilising social movements towards the future society is harder still. The merit of green politics is that it offers a way of getting to the root of economic and environmental crisis, grasps its interconnection, and can mobilise the widest range of social actors in the universal cause of a clean, safe, just, biodiverse future for all life forms within the living organism of the natural world. This is the ultimate eutopia, the realisation of the good within the biggest place of all, the planet itself.
Harmony in Blue and Silver Trouville 1865 Whistler
Eco-Praxis
We need to redefine ‘wealth’ in terms of life and its possibilities. Wealth, then, is not to be measured in monetary terms but in terms of time and space, the degrees of freedom we have to organise our relation to the environment to sustain and regenerate us in life so as to ensure human and planetary flourishing proceed together.
The greatest factor at work in change is human agency. Of all the forms of wealth, the most important is the moral and intellectual capacity to recognize biospheric principles and employ them within human society in relation to each and all. This denotes a metaphysical capacity to transcend biological, economic and environmental determinism and affirm the radical indeterminacy of the future.
This view emphasises the cognitive and moral praxis of human agents as the real game-changer bringing about a new world. Human beings learn by experience. Whilst the lessons can be forgotten or neglected, it is impossible to learn less. Learning, as a change in behaviour, is a metaphysical capacity that is always increasing. It is our greatest asset, our real wealth.
So whilst the physical component of wealth is constant in terms of the biosphere, the metaphysical component is gaining always. There is a tendency to rely on the material aspects of our wealth – economic growth, natural resources, technics — things that can be touched, seen, bought and sold, possessed. However, it is plain that our greatest wealth is the intangible metaphysical capacity that comes through experience and learning. That capacity gives human beings the ability to change their environment and change their behaviour as one and the same process.
Wealth consists of the physical, which is fixed and needs to be conserved, and the metaphysical, which is always gaining. This explains why demands dismissed as dreams, fantasies and impossibilities in one era – emancipation of women, universal suffrage, abolition of slavery, humane treatment of animals, there are countless examples – become realities in the next. Human beings change themselves and change their modes of behaviour and it is this factor that is the most important in seeing through and breaking through all the false fixities by which an existing society can narrow the limits of the possible and freeze human action.
In this respect, the environmental crisis is a challenge to human creativity and ingenuity, a demand that we innovate mentalities and mentalities more appropriate to what we know of ourselves and our relation to planetary life-support systems. And this means that we are going to have to develop an entirely new accounting system, one that acknowledges wealth as a comprehensive concept concerning life. It’s a call to employ our natural capacities and resources with less effort, energy and demands. The arts and sciences suffer from an over-specialisation so that the necessary integration of economics within a physical, psychological, biological and ecological frame is lacking. But this integration is what is required if we are going to learn, change and flourish in accordance with biospheric principles. If progress means anything other than an illusion, it’s time we realised that we go nowhere on this planet beyond the unfolding of the potentialities we are born with. And that is to respect nature’s circularity over against the technological bluff of a complete industrial transcendence of nature.
Matisse Le bonheur de vivre, 1905-6
In physical terms, human beings are born utterly helpless, the weakest physically of all the species, but with the capacity for social learning. There is a good natural reason for human beings being born physically helpless – it spurs social cooperation and learning.
Human beings have the capacity to learn that the Earth is well-designed and well-resourced, coming to value these conditions for life in the here and now. Human beings have the capacity to learn and the need to learn. We have reached that point now, with carbon emissions soon reaching a level that we will be absorbing too much of the sun's radiation. When we get into a state of carbon imbalance and go beyond a variety of tipping points, sinks will turn into sources, and it will be well-nigh impossible to regenerate life on earth. The human race has been getting closer and closer to this point of no return. We're now at the critical point which will determine whether we will survive and thrive or even survive at all. We've come to the point of learning that true wealth, as a metaphysical capacity enhancing our physical world, can only increase, can never diminish. We are now able to escape We are able to throw off the elaborate complex of slave thinking which has us competing with each other for ever scarce resources, snatching to hoard and hoarding to snatch.
Amazonka in the Mountains 1918 Kandinsky
All over the world people are starting to demand real solutions to problems of poverty, unemployment, inequality, environmental destruction. They are joining forces to set the world to rights, demanding that governments act to bring about peace and plenty. They are asking for something that governments cannot deliver. The state power is secondary and derivative; the state is determined and not determinant. The capital system is not a public domain but a regime of private accumulation. The state must facilitate the process of private accumulation, as a condition of its own power, resources and legitimacy. To join together and press demands for peace and plenty upon governments is to presume that the problems facing humanity are political. They are not, they are moral, social and environmental – they concern the whole way of life. The crisis of the capital system confront the political leaders with a vacuum, and a vacuum cannot be reformed. The vacuum is the inability of the global economic system to respect planetary boundaries and, further, to distribute the proceeds of its ecologically destructive, endless economic growth in an even and an equitable fashion. The result is that despite record levels of production, the bulk of humankind does not have enough to survive more than half of its potential life span, let alone to flourish. It is the war of all against all win or lose scenario that cancels individual freedom out in a mutual antagonism, and which quickly leads to impasse. Slowly but surely, people around the world are learning of new, life-enhancing ways of doing politics. This is a return of politics to its ancient Greek origins as a public life concerned with creative self-realisation and flourishing.
I bought this card from the women’s cooperative News from Nowhere in Liverpool, UK. Worldchanging is a team sport, and there’s a place on the team for everyone. Finding our place and playing our part within nature’s circularity. Building a better world means fitting our praxis to the contours of nature.
To call our times one of technology, change and crisis is to acknowledge the shadow of climate change that has been cast over all political thought and action. That Doomsday shadow throws our efforts to live, work and struggle as before in sharp relief, as though life can be so easily normalized in light of the knowledge of the eco-catastrophe to come. We continue to act ritualistically, seeking out the old ways and prospects for economic betterment, pretending to intervene positively, but only in order to deny that the world is grotesquely skewed. The same course after economic collapse and ecological doomsday as before? It is institutional and psychological inertia, a freezing of human thought and action, a business as usual which rests on accustomed but petrified premises. Instead of learning and changing, we keep using our accustomed but blunted tools.
The purpose of this essay is to urge human beings to employ their moral and intellectual capacity to begin to construct an alternative.
The looming eco-catastrophe is too much to grasp morally, politically, psychologically and intellectually. Yet we have no alternative but to wrestle with it, in the very least deal with it in our own little corner. Or we can remain in denial or go into withdrawal.
The record melt in the Arctic, extreme weather, record rains and droughts, crop failure - such events demand that we abandon what we now know are the illusions of material progress — the facts of economic growth turning particular tendencies into a single dominant and permanent one, projected ‘laws’ as independent of actual human agents. Along with genuine human improvement came a concomitant potential for human destructiveness. The illusion of ‘Progress’ blinds us to contrary tendencies that work to undermine any gains that are made.
Real solutions yielding a genuine alternative society should be rooted not in reified technics, abstract concepts and passive hopes but in concrete human agents who are the ones who make history. Only through a change in behaviour as a self-change does humanity and human life improve over time. If we rely passively on economic growth and technics, then who can deny that both could simply diminish?
There is no shortage of political ideas and technical solutions, but politics today is in search for the people who will make such ideals real. This lack of active democratic content renders politics hollow. One can debate various energy infrastructures – biomass, CCS, geothermal, nuclear, wind, wave, solar - and various engineering solutions – biotechnology, GM food, geoengineering – but they can all be faulted for a false objectivism and moral and social insufficiency, for writing at too great a distance from creative human agency, for ignoring the democratic deficit. There is a need to value the power of individuals acting collectively to transform their societies and themselves, to make history. The grounds for hope lie not at the level of reified forces of economic growth and technics, but among concrete individuals as change agents, who, in opposing this war, in fighting that injustice, in making this demand, overcome the inertia of current institutions and take history into their own hands.